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in atable kayaks, because nothing makes you
feel more 11 than bouncing down a river in an
oversize inner tube. He'd never been in white
water before, and he soon discovered that pad-
dling the little kayaks, called duckies, was hard
work. We struggled with headwinds, grounded
on rocks, and paddled hard to keep up with the
ra s. Yet tired as we were, Sam came o the river
almost skipping.
at night the Milky Way choked the sky, and
we couldn't nd the Big Dipper in the twinkling
throng. Sam turned in early, so I went down to
the water to listen to the river's simple sym-
phony. Something splashed at my feet, and
when I flicked on my headlamp, I beheld a
tiny sh darting around the shallows: a native
chinook salmon, o spring of the big shadows
we'd seen lurking in the deeper pools. Chinook
fed the Sheep Eaters for millennia. Once tens
of thousands of them came to spawn annually
in the Middle Fork; now, eight major dams on
the Snake and Columbia Rivers have exacted a
toll on the sh in their 900-mile journey to the
sea---one of the greatest migrations in nature.
designation is no
guarantee that a river will remain truly wild.
In fact, several of the nation's most cher-
ished water ways have landed on the annual
Most Endangered Rivers list produced by the
advocacy group American Rivers. ey include
southern Oregon's Chetco, where gold miners
plan to suction-dredge some of the best salmon
spawning grounds in the state. Maine's legend-
ary Allagash, the river that taught Henry David
oreau the meaning of wilderness, has long
been mired in controversy over bridges and
additional access points in its protected corridor.
And former Vice President Walter Mondale, a
co-sponsor of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act,
says of the treasured St. Croix, which runs by
his Minnesota summer home: "If this river is
ever destroyed, it'll die of nicks and cuts. A
bridge here, a power line there. ese threats are
everywhere," he adds, "and they have to be
fought everywhere. Just go to one of the unpro-
tected rivers in the Northeast or South and see
how polluted they are."
The stream of my youth, North Carolina's
aptly named Tar, is one such river, though
my friends and I were too young to know the
di erence then. We caught bass and bluegills
from beneath the ra s of old soda and bleach
bottles that oated at each logjam. We shot the
ducks that exploded from the quiet bends where
discarded washing machines and tires lay. We
waded when the water dropped to knee-deep
in summer and carried a faint whi of the sew-
age treatment plant upstream. ough I caught
countless sh from the Tar's waters, I released
them to their turbid home. My parents drew the
line at eating them.
Such threats seemed many miles and moons
from the clear, clean water of central Idaho. e
next day the sun rose white-hot above the ridge-
line, turning the Middle Fork into an undulat-
ing strand of emeralds. A herd of bighorn sheep
joined us for breakfast. Bald and golden eagles
glared at us from their perches as American dip-
pers itted from rock to rock. e guides lled
ITWASA
LIVING PAGE
FROM
AMERICA'S
PAST, WHEN
EVERY RIVER
WAS CLEAN,
POTABLE,
AND FULL
OF LIFE.